Power and sex take centre stage in Robin Richardson’s formidable third collection, Sit How You Want.

Plane crashes and automobile mishaps are the backdrop for female narrators who grapple with terror,
anxiety, and powerlessness: “When I say I’m fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy.” In their grim wit, sinister straight talk, and sometimes violent bawdiness, Richardson’s poems
work as counter-charms against the lingering trauma of abusive relationships, both familial and romantic. The book embodies a belief in poetry as an instrument of change, a tool for transforming pain into exuberant verbal energy: “It is the thrill of ruination / makes us innovate.”

East and West, Laura Ritland’s astonishing debut, is a book of visions. These are roving poems drawn to defamiliarizing points of view, and are exquisitely attentive to the way the world exceeds our senses (“Cloud deduced cloud / after cloud and cloud.”) Beckoningly tender, lucid and intelligent, elegaic without being maudlin, East and West explores what Ritland calls the “middle ground” of childhood, family, diaspora, and migration, and how new cultural ideas can disrupt traditional perspectives. “My bedroom window an escape hatch / to endless sights of coastal stars.” Ritland takes the measure of herself—“I’m an integer of my own society”—in one of the most distinctive and beautifully turned styles in Canadian poetry.

Global Poetry Anthology 2017 is a one-of-a-kind collection of contemporary previously-unpublished poems gathered from all corners of the English speaking world. An international editorial board ensures the present volume's cosmopolitan palette, and the "blind" selection process guarantees that choices have been made according to poetic calibre alone.

Vehicule Press's Signal Editions is proud to offer the third volume in the Global Poetry Anthology Series--a rich and exciting mix of established and emerging voices.

Dog Ear poses personal impressions and collective questions – what we leave behind, if anything, in the physical world – by cultivating images and semi-narratives that are deeply, and sometimes, ridiculously human. In doing so, Johnstone’s poems confidently confront love, death, and spectacle. —Brick: A Literary Journal

In many ways, Johnstone is a mysterious poet. The inner world of his poems is full of strange associations and dreamlike successions of images. It is a bold, skillful sort of poetry, and it makes one curious what canyons he will attempt in the years to come.
—University of Toronto Quarterly

Johnstone's poetry is incredibly efficient; there are no wasted words. Both thematically and technically, there is a dirty edge to many of these poems, which gives them a raw and uncensored feel. —The New Quarterly

Di Saverio is a poet whose imagination belongs in the company of Blake, Pound, Layton, Rimbaud, Nelligan, among others. —Darren Bifford, Arc Magazine

Hamilton's Marc di Saverio offers one of the strongest debuts of late in Sanitorium Songs. Primarily collecting sonnets, villanelles, haiku and translations, di Saverio shows a stunning command of these forms and a talent for startling imagery. His translations (of Rimbaud, Baudelaire and others) are masterful, while his original poems show a clear symbolist influence and a sharp, severe musicality. —Jonathan Ball, Winnipeg Free Press

Signal Poetry

Since 1981, over one hundred titles have been published in the Signal Editions poetry series—the poetry imprint at Véhicule Press. One-quarter of the list are first-time authors.

About the editor

Poet, essayist and critic Carmine Starnino became editor of Signal Editions in January 2001, succeeding founding editor Michael Harris. Starnino is the author of four books of poetry including The New World which was nominated for the 1997 A.M. Klein Prize for poetry and the 1997 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and Credo which won the 2001 Canadian Authors’ Association Prize for poetry. He is the editor of The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry. Lazy Bastardism: Essays & Reviews on Contemporary Poetry was published in 2012. He lives in Montreal.